Introduction
The basic concept of Cloud IT is a serverless office, all servers (domain controllers, file servers, mail servers, etc.) are virtualized in a datacenter with WAN Optimized connections. Why? Less expensive and more reliable.
This is not theoretical. My name is Rick Parker and I started Bedouin Networks in late 2006 to prove this would work. Bedouin's beta client was Gimundo.com and Gimundo ran on the Bedouin platform for about 14 months before being sold. The results were simply stunning, no downtime for any services, none, for the last 7 months. This is the way IT should be and can be. What I will be doing is explaining how this was done and what can be done to improve the concept and design by suggesting and requesting feedback from others.
Some of the Vendors on the right I am sure you have heard of, others probably not, but they were selected primarily through experience but a few out of sheer interest. This is one of those circumstances where the whole is exponentially more important then the parts. The list is a Cloud IT Stack made up of the primary components, Datacenter, WAN Optimization, Virtualization, Monitoring, etc. some components may be swapped out but one of each is required.
The othe key concepts are the Virtual Private Cloud and RAID to the next level, The Redundant Array of Inexpensive Datacenters
Cloud IT - Not just for Big Business
The system I setup for Bedouin Networks was only about $200k for all new hardware, using usedhardware it would have been much less. While this sounds expensive it could support about 30 servers and many more just by adding more CPUs and Memory. This was with 3 years 24x7 Vendor support. so $200k / 36 = $5500 a month give or take. I think a reasonable IT budget for a small technology company
2 comments:
Rick - are you still going to be posting here? I'm interested to see what your plan was, what pitfalls you hit along the way, etc.
Looking forward to your story!
Rick, this is James Ross, I am very interested in the rest of the story.
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